Google AdWords: Now with IP Exclusion

June 18, 2007

Google AdWords has finally released an IP Exclusion option, allowing advertisers to block their ads from showing up for specific IP addresses. From the AdWords Help Files:

In addition to controlling your ad placement through methods such as location and language targeting, site exclusion, and network distribution preferences, you can refine your targeting with Internet Protocol (IP) address exclusion. This feature enables you to specify IP addresses where you don’t want your ads to appear.

You can exclude up to 20 IP addresses, or range of addresses, per campaign. All ads in the campaign are prevented from showing for users with the IP addresses you specify, so we recommend you choose your list carefully.

IP exclusion helps tackle the issue of competitor click fraud: if your competitors are clicking on your ads, you can filter them out so they don’t see your ads. That way you won’t end up paying for clicks that don’t yield to a conversion. Search Engine Roundtable points out that if you frequently search for your own keywords, you can block your own IP address to keep from affecting your click through rate.

In a related vein, last week Google started delivering Content Placement Reports to let advertisers control to a degree where their contextual ads appear. Like Content Placement reports, IP Exclusion will help advertisers manage where their ads are showing up.

2 Responses to “Google AdWords: Now with IP Exclusion”

IP Exclusion can be used to mitigate click fraud from competitors, from known bad and high risk IP addresses, and from specific IPs and IP ranges used to generate clicks through Made for Ads (MFA) sites.

It can also be used to prevent clicks from your internal networks (clicks from your employees), vendors, and agencies.

Consider the use of a 3rd party auditing firm to help analyze and update your IP exclusion and domain exclusion lists on Google.